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Creative questions are a major component of examination in design education for testing creative aptitude. During this process of framing creative questions, examiners remain ever-inquisitive to know whether questions framed by them really capture features of creative questions. Our objective is to explore whether technology can support examiners in situations like these. This paper investigates features of creative questions through mixed-method research techniques. A model is proposed based on DL algorithms that can find out inherent creativity factors in questions and identify whether a question is creative. This process of identifying creative questions triggers decision-making of examiners by which they update their questions based on the outcome of the DL-based system. This model is implemented using bidirectional encoder representations using transformers (BERT), and long short-term memory (LSTM) method for identifying creativity in questions, and their performance is compared. Results highlight that BERT overrules LSTM mechanism, showing 99.99% and 81.006% accuracy, respectively. Inter-rater reliability between the model and examiner’s opinion shows higher agreement (α = 0.96) in categorizing creative questions, and comparison among baselines builds trust in the model. A significant contribution of this research is to capture creative features in a question and categorize whether a question is creative in design education. This model highlights human–machine collaboration and promotes examiners' decision-making process to frame effective questions. It attempts to reduce uncertainty of examiners and assists in quick decisions to include creativity features in their questions by providing feedback on whether a question is creative.

Evaluating novelty in design education is subjective and generally depends on expert’s referential metrics. Presently, practitioners in this field perform subjective evaluation of answers of prospective students, but many a time, humans are prone to errors when associated with repetitive tasks on large-scale. Therefore, this paper attempts to automate the process of evaluating novelty by a proposed computational model. The present study explores design aptitude to evaluate novelty in solutions provided by students in an examination. Mixed-methods research is conducted based on structured questionnaire and analysis to investigate features of subjective evaluation of novelty practiced for evaluation in design education. The survey resulted in features that closely resemble human evaluation strategies for evaluating novelty from descriptive solutions. Further, a computational model is proposed, designed, and implemented that evaluates novelty. Scores are generated for each feature by unsupervised learning techniques, eventually calculating novelty score by a scoring function. This model suggests unambiguous scores to solutions, which might help in a consistent selection of students aspiring admission to design schools. This study attempts to reduce pain points of educational practitioners by offering a voluntary automated technique for subjective evaluation and optimize trustworthiness of students in examination process. In future, this model can be extended for evaluating any other domain of interest.

User Interface (UI) acts as a mediator between human and computer or any other system or sub-systems which exhibit its function, structure, and behavior. The complexities of UI are open issues that make it formidable to explore it. Supervision makes any task easier by explaining the elements and intentions of UI. Self-Explanatory User Interfaces (SEUI) traps the complexities of UI and provides assistive tools with it in order to supervise users addressing usability using visual and aural syntax. UIs require adapting to the mental model of users and support them during their task. The study presented in this paper has been administered to adult users (age group: 50-64 years) with minimum exposure to technologies and often requires support to get accustomed to interfaces. To complete a task successfully, it is essential to justify the intent of the design, purpose of any textual entry, the usability of the buttons, importance of the labels, visibility, or blurriness of certain items to end-users. Literature associated with SEUI highlight the intervention of Model-Driven Engineering in UI. But very few studies in this area have investigated concatenation of visual and aural syntax in UI. The visual aspect aims at explaining a clear and concise diagrammatic representation of the hierarchy of UI and the significance of each user entry while the aural dimension intends to provide audio instructions to the users. The results include evidence of significant growth in task completion rate and improvement in the task completion time of the novice users assisted with combined visual and aural syntax tool embedded in an interface. The results of the current study are significant in light of the designing and development of UIs that address adults who are a novice and lack exposure to UIs. The solution presented in this paper would support them to migrate from being a novice to an expert.

User-centred designers study user behaviours, to create products that fetch maximum adoption and longer loyalty. All this has led to an increased emphasis on user engagement. Often the ill-impact on the user gets overshadowed by business goals. The study presented in this paper focuses on digital well-being of the user and how designers can aid in developing tools to equip the users. A detailed literature review is conducted so as to highlight the inconsistencies of existing digital media that fail to address the issue of digital well-being. They highlight factors other than lacking self-control that lead to uncontrolled tech consumption. The literature review is then followed by a qualitative research study that investigates current mobile usage and its discontinuation pattern. Combining insights from the literature and the exploratory study with users, the study finally suggests unique approaches that designers and the mobile industry can adopt to design for disengagement. The findings of the study can contribute to understanding the middle ground that looks out for the user’s well-being without compromising on businesses and platforms.

Design entrance exams are common nowadays for securing admission to design schools in India, be it private or public institutes. Students are often examined during these competitive exams to test their creative aptitude. Over the years, format of design entrance exams in India has gone through innumerable changes. In some formats, objective questions are preferred, in some subjective tests are conducted, while few prefer a combination of both lack of a standardized format of testing creativity across design schools in India, unlike engineering and medical colleges, raises questions like (1) Do these design entrance tests really capture creativity to its fullest? (2) Do they conform to any standardized format of creativity testing? The study reported in this paper intends to investigate these questions by conducting a detailed comparative study of existing entrance exam formats of Design Schools of India. A detailed analytical approach by using affinity mapping and generating open codes was used to classify and categorize question formats of different Indian Design entrance exams. The open codes were then mapped with the extracted factors of the literature review with an objective to identify the factors confirming to creativity evaluation. The results highlight that existing entrance exam, while capturing major factors for creativity evaluation, lacks in capturing a few essential factors that provide greater insight into the creative instincts of an individual assessed. A model for standardization of creativity assessment has also been suggested based on the study results. This study would provide new light into the nature of design-based entrance examinations in India and might lead the way toward a standardized Design entrance exam in the future.

The Indian e-commerce industry is rapidly growing. One of the major contributing factors toward the success of these companies is the quality of user experience their platforms provide. The study reported in this paper primarily focuses on India’s top B2C organizations and the role of definitive user experience elements in shaping the success of these organizations. A heuristic-based comparative study was conducted among the top e-commerce Web applications in order to identify unique features that contribute to a sumptuous user experience. The analytical study was backed up by user studies that report the expectation of the customers and their frustrations. The collective insights were then correlated to each platform’s market ranking and share with an objective to identify and analyze features, design cues and elements that contribute to their standing in the Indian market. In a nutshell, the qualitative study explores connections between market ranking, usability heuristics, and user study insights in order to prescribe design features, cues, and elements that benchmark the user experience framework for B2C applications in an Indian context. The insights elaborate on the current trends, gaps, and opportunity areas for B2C applications.

During recent decades, due to demand for customer-oriented product design, designers and manufacturers have been more attentive to define customer requirements during initial stage of design process. As such, importance of integrating ergonomics, particularly for capturing customer requirements, has become an essential activity. The literature provides evidence of numerous studies focusing on various design methodologies that are helpful for incorporating customer requirements at initial design stage. However, existence of multiple design methodologies makes it difficult for designers to choose one over the other. Further, ambiguity among designers while selecting any one of these methodologies may lead to an unnecessary increase in lead time for product design process. Therefore, in order to address this specific issue, a comparative review study across design methodologies with an objective to integrate ergonomics requirements has been conducted and reported here. The focus of the study is on integrating ergonomics requirements in design in initial design stages, specifically to include conceptual design, embodiment design, and detailed design. This paper reports a critical analysis of the applicability of these methodologies. The outcome of the study would be beneficial for designers (with an intention to contribute toward ergonomic led innovation) to choose design methodologies judiciously and importance of customer requirements capturing at the initial stage of the design process.

The study reported in this paper investigates the effect of navigational mechanisms on students in a computer based assessment environment at a cross-cultural setting. Literatures in computer based assessment studies highlight the phenomenon of “test mode effect” that can explain the differences in test scores across two different formats of testing. In this study the authors posit that even different formats of presentation through the same media might affect students’ performance in a computer based assessment environment. The study reported here investigates the effect of two different navigational mechanisms namely, vertical menu and step based navigations on students’ performance. Students from Indian universities and American universities participated in the study. The results highlight that navigational mechanisms affect students’ performance and their subjective evaluation of the Computer based Assessment system. The results of the study would provide navigational heuristics for the Graphical User Interface designers to design a learner centered Computer based Assessment system.

There is more chance of product acceptance if consumers perceived a product more pleasurable. It is evident that certain product personality can make product pleasurable. Therefore, present study aims to discover the effect of a baby-like personality of electronic product (coffeemaker) on user’s perceived pleasure. The current study employed two separate experiments to measure product personality and users’ perceived pleasure respectively. First experiment described about the personality evaluation of coffeemakers which had different appearances; whereas, in the second experiment, users’ perceived pleasure was evaluated. It was observed from the results of the first experiment that baby-like personality perceptions depend on appearances of coffeemakers. In addition, users perceived the coffeemaker more pleasurable due to higher degree of baby-like personality. Thus, it can be envisaged that baby schema effect may be used for enhancement of product choice as consumers felt pleasure due to baby-like product personality.

Different social networking applications commonly have different layouts which include different background colours, contact grid options, etc. Fewer studies have been taken into the account of user preferences of these attributes. In addition, aesthetics plays an important role in interface design acceptance of mobile applications especially in social networking domain. In corroboration with available literature, the present study was conducted to understand the users’ preferences for various layout elements which include different background colours, contact list grids, contact details grids, and message reply buttons in social networking mobile applications, based on aesthetics perception. Results of the present study highlight that aesthetically pleasant layout attributes are beneficial for user acceptance of user interface of social networking applications. Based on present study results, an interface design guideline was developed to design interfaces for new and better mobile applications in the domain of social networking messenger.